Writing About Your Childhood in Memoir

No matter what your memoir is about, it’s almost certain to need some backstory—things that happened before the main events of your memoir and are relevant to your book. You’ll have to decide how much to write, whether to integrate it across several chapters or give it its own dedicated chapter, and whether to dip into family history or limit your story to your own lifetime. And at some point, you’ll need to wrangle your childhood into some sort of perspective, so you know how to link it into your book.

(How to Write a Compelling Memoir.)

To begin approaching that job, let’s start with a quick reminder of what a memoir even is: a book about a specific slice or theme of your life. Not your whole life—just a specific part of it. The thing that makes any memoir work is its through line—the central spine of its plot, the big themes and lessons wrapped up with that plot, and ultimately how you changed as a result. Deviate from your through line and your memoir will start to wander, losing direction and focus. Follow your through line and your readers will come with you on your journey to the big lesson you learned and the big message you want to give them.

So, why might you struggle to find the right angle on your childhood? (This assumes that your book is not specifically about your childhood but concentrates on parts of your life that happened later.)

Your childhood was long. It was complex and rich, full of key moments and significant relationships. Maybe you lived in several different places. Maybe you suffered tragic losses too early. Maybe you found religion. Maybe you fell in love with ballet (or coding!) and your desire to excel in it shaped your days—or maybe you were forced to practice piano for hours every afternoon and hated it. Maybe you were bullied at school. Maybe you survived an eating disorder. Maybe you realized you were queer. Maybe you were abused. Maybe you fell in love.

And certainly you had far more than one defining experience over all those years.

So how do you know which parts of your childhood to include in your book? How do you find the right lens to put your youth into perspective for the sake of your memoir?

You consider each major part of your childhood through the filter of your through line. The ones that relate to your through line, clearly and without forcing them, might have a place in your book. The ones that aren’t connected are the ones you leave out.

If your book is about how you learned to love again after your partner broke your heart, experiences that relate to self-image, interpersonal relationships, and your personal resilience might well be connected to your through line. Your high school partner cheating on you probably belongs in your book; your years-long mission to conquer your fear of spiders might; the day you won first place at the science fair even though you had never thought you were good at science might not.

If your book is about your experience working with foster kids and helping them discover their true potential, your high school partner’s infidelity is much less likely to be relevant—but the resilience you learned in the face of spiders and your unexpected victory at the science fair might well be.

Once you’ve decided which stories are most likely to belong in your memoir, the next question is how to frame the individual experiences so they feel connected for the reader. How do you put these events into perspective so they relate to your book?

Let’s take the science fair victory as an example. Say you know it belongs in your memoir, because it relates to your big message—perhaps something about not limiting yourself to the things you know you are good at—but how do you tell it? Is it a story about your own effort? About how it changed other people’s view of you? About how it changed your view of yourself?

Now’s the time to look at your plot. Is your relationship with effort central to your plot? If so, that’s the lens to use to write this scene: looking at how hard you worked, at how difficult it was, at how you felt when you succeeded, at how it changed the ways you approached challenges thereafter.

If your plot relates to other people’s expectations of you and this was a moment you learned something critical about other people, frame the story that way: give us as much detail as you can about how people reacted, and show us how their treatment of you changed afterwards and how your understanding of others shifted because of it.

If this experience affected the choices you made from then on, that’s the angle to use in the scene: emphasize the impact on you and on your inner monologue, the shift in yourself following this moment, and relate future choices back to it.

Notice a theme emerging? Just as you are in your memoir overall, you’re looking for the ways you changed—the long-term impacts a moment had on you. Any piece of your history that you include in your book should have an effect on you that relates to the rest of the book, and you should frame the way you tell it around that effect.

You might not be able to see which stories support your through line until you’re already a draft in. That’s fine—one of the things you’re looking for when you write your second draft is which stories have snuck past this filter and need cutting, and backstory information can often sneak past. When a story feels deeply relevant to your life, it can be hard to spot that it isn’t actually relevant to your book. But once you start writing or editing to your through line, you’ll be able to pull out the stories that don’t belong and find the best lens for the ones that do.

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